Digital image based object detection, especially with respect to traffic sign recognition (TSR) and vehicle recognition, has seen increased attention over the past few years. For example, object detection systems are currently being implemented in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). These object detection systems are used to detect and/or localize instances of objects of some class of interest in digital videos or still images. Conventional systems implementing hard-coded recognition techniques tend to be specific to the classes of objects to be recognized and require the program code to be rewritten to detect other classes of interest. Furthermore, conventional object detection systems and methods generally require a large amount of computing resources, have slow detection speeds, and can be inaccurate at times.